


Things We Lost In The Fire

by cecilantro



Series: 100 Days Of Ficlets [23]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 17:36:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14049360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilantro/pseuds/cecilantro
Summary: Open your eyes, Caleb.He denies, stubborn, his fingers ball into fists. He won’t see it again. Nobody can make him.Airy, ashen fingers touch his face and peel, pull back his eyelids, he tries so hard not to.





	Things We Lost In The Fire

Caleb won’t open his eyes.   
He’s been here so many times, too many fucking times before, he knows everything that happened here, it’s charred into his mind and painted in embers, charcoal, and blood.   
He keeps his eyes shut tight, there’s no place for blue in this city of orange-red-grey-black blame and hurt. He feels a wind pull and tug at his coat, his hand uncurl to roam it, he knows where every hole will be in the future because this isn’t real anymore. He skims his fingers over the third button down, it’s still there, lower he knows there will be a tear but there isn’t.   
The screaming around him seems distant, as much as it fills his world, leaves behind no space for anything else.   
He knows that he did this.   
An ember touches his cheek and burns, something that scars him later, he’s felt it so many times that he doesn’t even flinch.    
The wind whispers, a voice that sounds somehow like ash and flame, crackling and hellish, soft, remnants,   
_ Open your eyes, Caleb _ .   
He denies, stubborn, his fingers ball into fists. He won’t see it again. Nobody can make him.   
Airy, ashen fingers touch his face and peel, pull back his eyelids, he tries so hard not to.   
There’s new bodies ahead of him, the charred skull of a priest, a pair of smoking boots, Caleb stares at them, the ash fingers withdraw and he doesn’t close his eyes again.   
The charred skull of the priest clacks and crumbles as it sits up, empty eyes burning like coals as it turns.   
“ _ You did this _ .” It whispers with a voice like the footstep of death, Caleb takes a step,   
“I- I’m so, I didn’t mean-”   
“ _ You did this _ .” It repeats, louder, “ _ To all of them _ .”   
Caleb looks to the scattering of bodies behind the priest. He knows who they are, for the first year he would take their pulses in his dreams every night, and find nothing. He cried over each of their bodies as they crumbled in his fingertips. He’s seen this all.    
The charred skull raises a hand, terrible, eerie, full still of flesh but sallow, like death, the last time Caleb saw this priest.   
Caleb does not want to turn and look in the direction it points, but the wind takes his shoulders and twists him cruelly, his hair whips and tugs, a thousand fingers of death.   
The first body he sees is Nott’s. Identifiable only by the mask lying at the burnt fingertips, half of her body turned to dust and the other to charcoal.   
Nott isn’t something new that his mind tortures him with, but he still steps forward and kneels, his eyes fill, blurring his vision, it’s almost a kindness.

The wind whips by and dries his tears, content for nothing but Caleb’s own pain.   
He trembles as he reaches to her, gently touching the hand that still holds shape. It feels like burnt wood under his fingers.   
This is bad enough.   
It isn’t over.   
He doesn’t get the chance to pull himself together over her remains before the cruel winds pull him up and push him on.   
New territory. He hates getting close to people.   
Beauregard is first, a char mark that has burnt out her chest and only her chest, she sits against a wall with eyes glassy and unseeing. Yasha is flung across her legs, burns like hand marks on her neck, over her mouth, her slowly burning hair hides most of her face.   
Jester, face-down and eyes closed, she could be sleeping. Caleb knows, inherently, her death is for smoke. No part of what he did is forgotten, she reaches for Fjord.   
Fjord’s form reaches for her, too, but his face, skull, half his body is just… gone, blackened to nothing, much like the priest. The shell-print armor that Caleb had given him is recognisable. Caleb moves to him and crouches, a hand so lightly on the chestplate that it’s barely a touch at all.    
“ _ Bitte. _ ” Caleb take a shuddering breath, his mother tongue resting heavily in his mouth, “ _ verzeih mir. _ ”   
_ Please, forgive me. _ __  
He stands, knows who’s left.   
Mollmauk’s only burn is a still-smouldering, glowing hand mark, set straight over his heart, his coat lies open and the handprint is seared through his shirt into his skin. Molly looks peaceful, like he’s meditating, sitting upright. As Caleb approaches, he opens his eyes, and the red is somehow cooling, like water, it douses Caleb.   
“Hello.” Molly greets, and Caleb, as though pulled, lifts his right hand and shifts, kneels, places it against the print on Molly’s chest.   
It fits perfectly.   
Molly looks at his hand with a distant interest, a little smile,   
“It’s not what you think, you know.” he tells Caleb.   
“I haven’t hurt you, not yet.” Caleb says, his teeth chatter despite the heat, “I can still stop it.”   
“No,” Molly shakes his head and lifts a hand to rest over Caleb’s, “You can’t, because this isn’t yours, not this time.”   
“It is my hand, Mollymauk.”   
“Yes, and it’s my heart.”   
Molly sighs and stands, it pulls Caleb up with him. He looks across the bodies of their friends, wincing only when he looks at Yasha.   
“I’m glad, honestly, that this is your nightmare.” He tells Caleb, squeezes his fingers, “I know I’m not real, but I don’t think I could cope with seeing Yasha like you do.”   
“I don’t cope.” Caleb tells him, “Mollymauk, please…”   
“What do you want, my love?” Molly lifts his other hand to Caleb’s cheek and brushes the new burn there, “I’ll do what I can.”   
“Help me.” Caleb says, his eyes begging, “I don’t want to see this anymore.”   
Molly smiles a little and leans in, Caleb feels Molly kiss him, and a split second after Molly’s lips meet his own, he sits upright in his chair at The Leaky Tap.   
  
Nott is staring at him, concerned, and he feels himself pull away from something warm and wrapped around him.   
“He wouldn’t go to bed, we couldn’t carry you…” Nott says, a little panicked, and Caleb looks around to put the puzzle pieces together.   
Molly is swaying upright beside him, rubbing his eyes with one hand, the other moving to Caleb’s shoulder. By the warmth when he first awoke, Caleb assumes he had his head nestled on Molly’s shoulder, and Molly had been resting his cheek against Caleb’s head, an arm around him.   
“Caleb, are you okay?” Molly pulls himself close, a distance that would, usually, be uncomfortable. Following that nightmare, though, Caleb wants nothing more than to cling to him. And so he does, as close as he can, he buries his head in Molly’s shoulder and sobs unrestrained, their other friends have gone to their rooms and he has nothing to hide. Molly snakes his arms very gently around him, rocks and hushes.   
“Nott,” Molly says, “If you want to go, I can care for him.”   
Nott shakes her head.   
“I… I care about him, too.” She tells Molly, and he nods, and gestures to her to come around the table. She moves and sets a hand on Caleb’s back, very gently, she knows he isn’t usually a fan. Caleb looses one hand from around Molly’s neck to pat behind him, he finds her shoulder and squeezes, not quite tight enough to be painful, but tight enough to come close.   
“Oh, it was a bad one.” she says softly, forlorn, Caleb nods against Molly’s shoulder and finds something that he wants,   
“Mollymauk, in, in the mines, I hurt and you- you- please, again.” He can’t find the right words, and hopes Molly knows.   
He does. Molly tilts, awkwardly, presses a kiss gently to the first place he can reach- the shell of Caleb’s ear. Caleb chokes out a “ _ Don’t stop _ .” and Molly continues a light, gentle trail, from his ear to his temple, each time, Caleb turns his head a fraction more from Molly’s neck so that he can continue. From Caleb’s temple across his forehead, to his nose, a gentle one to the corner of his eye, Molly sinks.   
Caleb’s grip on Nott loosens, she stares with no concept of privacy as his hand slips back up to Molly’s neck and Caleb lifts himself, just a little, his hand moves up, Molly’s jaw, Molly mirrors him. The carefully rounded fingernails of Mollymauk’s hand dig in gently to Caleb’s shoulder, pulling, the kisses trail personally, Molly pauses.   
“May I?”   
“Please.”   
And Molly presses his lips to Caleb’s, as gentle as ever but longer, thumb brushing skin in a grounding pattern.   
Molly’s hand shifts up, to Caleb’s cheek, and his thumb runs gently across an old burn scar.   
Caleb’s right hand slides down and places itself, quite of its own accord, over Molly’s heart.    
It’s a different kind of fire, one Caleb hasn’t felt in years, a passion instead of a burn.   
He understands what the Mollymauk in his dream was telling him.   
This Mollymauk, the real Molly,  __ his Molly, has fallen in love with him.   
They pull away from one another, slow, gentle, blue eyes meeting flat red, Caleb hadn’t realised that he was falling in love too, until a nightmare that he’s had a thousand times. More.   
Molly kisses the tip of his nose.


End file.
